Every day across the country, thousands of independent photographers, plumbers, beekeepers, chimney sweepers, and birthday party clowns whip out their old-school credit card swipers and take blurry carbon imprints of card numbers as payment for their services. Ask anyone who has used an old "knuckle-buster" and you’ll see that they are full of problems, from security issues to lost imprints to the initial cost of purchasing an imprinter.
Seattle entrepreneurs Derek Del Conte and Ryan Johnson are tackling this problem with the introduction of their Credit Card Terminal app for the iPhone. For $49.99, small business owners can connect the Credit Card Terminal app to an existing Authorize.Net account and easily take credit card payments through a drop-dead simple interface. Just enter in a number and expiration date, and the software seamlessly takes care of the rest. In addition to providing written receipts for the buyer, the app has an option to send an official receipt via Email.
Along with providing their own standalone point of sale terminal, Inner Fence recently announced an integration with Ring It Up POS, which combines Inner Fence's card processing ability with Ring It Up's advanced reporting and tracking of sales data. This partnership is the first example of the ability for two iPhone apps to work together by taking advantage of a URL-based protocol to send users to a secondary app while providing a return URL to enable the user to easily be transferred back to the original application. The team has
posted documentation
on their site for any developers looking to do similar implementations.
In an atmosphere where the
virtual flatulence genre
is dominating the top of the App Store charts, it’s so refreshing to see a practical, genuinely useful mobile application with a clear business value. Although at the rate that iFart is cashing in, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have an option to unleash a "Jack the Ripper" after each successful transaction.